It was especially dismaying to witness the responses of my Jewish faculty colleagues. Court Jews reflexively aligned themselves with their Wellesley benefactor, even when it discriminated against their own people. Jewish universalists, passionately committed to every worthy liberal cause, could not bear to identify and condemn discrimination only against Jews.

Self-hating Jews, inclined to identify themselves only in order to legitimate their criticism of Israel, endlessly reiterated the complexity of the issue, the better to evade the stark reality of anti-Semitism. Mostly, there were the Jews of silence, who could not rouse themselves to utter a word in public against anti-Semitism.

Wellesley’s Jewish problem persisted. The Religion Department, which had never granted tenure to a Jew, denied it to a young Jewish scholar with exemplary qualifications. Only when he threatened to sue the college did the president intervene to assure his promotion.

In the English Department a young woman hired to teach Yiddish and Jewish literature was informed by colleagues, “loud and clear, that work in Yiddish wasn’t valuable.” Her American literature syllabus was criticized for including Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Bernard Malamud. She was advised to eliminate the Jews, refocus on early modernism, and add Nathanial Hawthorne and Henry James. She soon resigned her position.

* * * * *

By the nineties, Wellesley, like so many academic institutions, had made a strong commitment to affirmative action and multicultural diversity. The special admissions consideration that once was confined to Christian applicants now was reserved for African-American, Latina, Asian and Native-American students – and, as always, the daughters of alumnae. A small Jewish Studies department was established. But Jewish students, with every reason to anticipate the benefits of heightened tolerance, found themselves marginalized as members of the white majority who were available as scapegoats for the grievances of other minorities.

In the spring of 1993 Tony Martin, a tenured member of the African-American Studies department, assigned for student reading an anonymously written volume published by the Nation of Islam titled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. A farrago of false claims, it asserted that Jews, united “in an unholy coalition of kidnappers and slave makers,” had played a “disproportionate” role, amounting to “monumental culpability,” in slavery and the slave trade – “the black holocaust.”

Martin’s department chairman accurately described the book as “patently and scurrilously anti-Semitic.” Martin responded by calling his colleague a “handkerchief head.”

To Martin, the explanation for the instant outcry against his assignment of the book was simple: “The long arm of Jewish intolerance reached into my classroom.” He was, he loudly proclaimed, the victim of “a classic textbook case study of organized Jewish intimidation.” In a college ruled by polite decorum, the vehement tirade of an angry black man was frightening and threatening.

Adding fuel to the fire, Martin self-published a venomous tract later that year titled The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches [sic.] from the Wellesley Battlefront. The self-described victim of a “Jewish onslaught,” he denounced allegations of his anti-Semitism as “a clever smokescreen for a burgeoning Jewish intolerance of truly Stalinist proportions.”

Hallucinating a Jewish cabal aligned against him, he noted that the dean of the college, chair of the Board of Trustees, head of student government, “a goodly portion” of the tenured faculty, and “sundry other persons in high positions, were all Jews.” Martin raged against “all the dirty Jewish tricks” used against him.

The college president, evidently terrified of confronting Martin, ignored his rants; said nothing about his teaching of scurrilous lies about the role of Jews in the slave trade; and responded with an impassioned plea for polite manners. That Martin was teaching anti-Semitic fabrication as historical fact did not seem to concern her.

* * * * *

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks the battleground for Jews at Wellesley shifted. The president forcefully reminded the Wellesley community to show respect for Muslim students, lest they be held guilty by association with Muslim terrorists. But she said nothing to reassure Jewish students, who encountered malicious allegations, on and off campus, of Israeli responsibility for the terrorist outrages, accompanied by mendacious claims that several thousand Jews, forewarned of the attacks, had not reported for work at the World Trade Center that day.

About the Author:Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of “Jewish State/Pariah Nation: Israel and the Dilemmas of Legitimacy,” to be published next month by Quid Pro Books.

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At one time I used to defend Rabbi Brant Rosen, Jessica Montell, Anat Saragusti ,Alan Eisner, Peter Bienart, etc. as being sincere people. Also, this week , Rabbi Warshal, a prominent rabbi came out in favor of an “open Hillel.”

I have had much interaction with breaking the silence and with B'tselem. When they accused the IDF of using white phosphorus against civilians, they lied. When they accused IDF snipers of killing a Palestinian woman in cold blood they lied.

The fact is they are enabling the next Holocaust. Their actions embolden the most extreme elements in the Islamic world who believe it is their sacred religious duty to destroy the Jewish people.

While, they are quick to provide ammunition for those who hate Israel and they are quick to condemn Pam Geller, they are exceedingly silent at the outrageous attacks made on Israel by the BDS, by breaking the silence, by B'tselem and by European Union funded NGOs.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE:"No more Jewish loyalty oaths"
by Steven J. Zipperstein, Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, is currently Kronhill senior scholar at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. A version of this essay was delivered on March 2 ,2014 at a forum on pluralism marking the 40th anniversary of the San Francisco Bay Area Lehrhaus Judaica.

Times reporter Anne Barnard reported (7/15) that Israel was to blame (so her Palestinian sources asserted) for its continued “occupation” of Gaza – which, Barnard failed to note, ended nearly a decade ago.

During much of the 20th century, elite American colleges and universities carefully policed their admission gates to restrict the entry of Jews. Like its Big Brothers – Harvard, Yale and Princeton – Wellesley College, where I taught history between 1971 and 2010, designed admission policy to perpetuate a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite.

Yossi Klein Halevi’s Like Dreamers (Harper) explores the lives of seven Israeli paratroopers in the Six-Day War who, his subtitle suggests, “Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation.” It offers a fascinating variation on the theme of Israel at a fateful crossroads, in search of itself, following the wondrously unifying moment at the Western Wall in June 1967 when Jewish national sovereignty in Jerusalem was restored for the first time in nineteen centuries.

Eighty years ago, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Barely a month later Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated president of the United States. For the next twelve years, until their deaths eighteen days apart in April 1945, they personified the horrors of dictatorship and the blessings of democracy.

One of my searing early memories from Israel is a visit nearly four decades ago to the Ghetto Fighters Museum in the Beit Lohamei Hagetaot kibbutz. The world’s first Holocaust museum, it was built soon after the Independence War by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Nearly sixty-five years ago Israel declared its independence and won the war that secured a Jewish state. But its narrow and permeable postwar armistice lines permitted incessant cross-border terrorist raids. For Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the mere existence of a Jewish state remained an unbearable intrusion into the Arab Middle East. As Egyptian President Nasser declared, “The danger of Israel lies in the very existence of Israel.”